The Hidden War
Dr Hassan Issa al-Talib
The scandal of the medicines hidden away in the central warehouses of the Ministry of Health — which no one doubts amounts to high treason and a criminal plot carried out by an agent — has cost the lives of thousands of innocent people who could have been saved. Worse still, this is a war crime, a crime against the state, against citizens and against humanity. It must not pass without a revealing investigation that clarifies the circumstances, holds those responsible to account, and extracts the lessons to be learned.
Similar conspiracies occurred in the early 1970s during the May Regime (1969–1985), when tankers filled with petrol and diesel shipped from Port Sudan arrived empty at depots because someone had deliberately punctured them and loosened the locks on valves. In that period, there were also deliberate collapses of some dams and main drainage channels in irrigation projects at the time of their inauguration.
What is happening today — the systematic destruction of public and sensitive service infrastructure such as electricity and water, the accumulation of waste in streets and public squares, environmental degradation, and the rapid succession of epidemics that are killing one another off, along with the emergence of obscure diseases unknown to previous generations of Sudanese — cannot plausibly all coincide by chance or as a series of random coincidences. Only a heedless or idle person would accept that. Anyone who hears, sees and reflects cannot calmly accept it as a mere coincidence.
This is a methodical war, conducted by novel and non-conventional means. It employs fifth-generation software and mechanisms, biological, electronic and administrative methods, and it is explicitly directed against the state and its citizens.
Accordingly, it must be confronted with the measures and defences it deserves.
All ministries and service agencies should therefore undertake immediate and comprehensive reviews and updates. These should include summoning every former undersecretary, secretary and director-general who served before April 2019 to clarify customs-related mysteries and practical measures, and to draw on their accumulated experience to interpret what has happened and what is happening. Most, if not all, of those officials were dismissed from public service and removed arbitrarily without the handover procedures required by the Civil Service Law; this has left a loss of institutional memory. Those who succeeded them often lacked customs expertise, professional know-how and sufficient national responsibility to perform what was required. Instead, many brought political agendas and ideological matrices imposed by those who appointed them, using public facilities to advance those agendas — as occurred when hospitals, national facilities and citizens’ homes were turned into military arsenals by militias, for the first time rebelling against the national army.
It is also necessary to activate the Economic Security Agency and the Agency for the Protection of Public Facilities and Strategic Infrastructure, and to review and update all protection tools and systems.
All the evidence points to the conventional battlefield war nearing resolution, God willing. But the other, non-conventional war is what the enemies of Sudan are now planning and pursuing; their aim is to make life unbearable for ordinary citizens, to punish and destroy them, because the people are the principal reason the foreign plot failed and resisted the profiteering and sale of the homeland.
Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=7800